Do your machines actually make money?

There is no single percentage that works, whatever you have been told. The rate that makes sense depends on what the machine cost, how it is financed, what maintenance and insurance run to, how long you will keep it, what it is worth when you sell it, and how many days a year it is actually on hire.

The calculator works backwards from those figures to the lowest rate that still clears the return you want, then suggests a rate above it that leaves you some room.

Your accounts show one profit figure for the whole business, so a strong machine can hide a weak one indefinitely. Modelling a single unit on its own gives you two things the company P&L cannot: its return on investment per year, and the month its cumulative cash turns positive.

If that month falls after the point you plan to sell the machine, it never pays for itself.

Utilisation on its own does not tell you much, because a busy machine on a poor rate still loses money. What matters is the pair together. The what-if grid shows the return at several rates crossed with several utilisation levels, so instead of chasing a single benchmark you can see which combinations actually work for the machine in front of you.

Compare the payback month and the lifetime return against what hiring in would cost you over the same period. If a machine only pays back in month 55 of a 60 month life, ownership is carrying nearly all of the risk for a very thin reward — and any drop in utilisation wipes it out.

No, and that is the point of it. You enter what the machine costs, what you plan to charge and how busy you expect it to be. Depreciation, financing, overhead, tax and resale are handled for you.

The answer arrives as four plain pass-or-fail checks. The profit & loss, balance sheet and cashflow sit underneath if you want them, but you do not have to read a single one.

It is free, there is no account, and there is no email wall in front of the result. You only give an email address if you want the full PDF report sent to you. We built the model for our own use and it costs us almost nothing to let other people use it.

No. The calculator runs entirely in your browser and nothing is sent anywhere while you work. There are two exceptions, both of which you choose. The chat assistant reads the figures on screen when you send it a message, so it can answer about your deal instead of asking you to retype everything, and we keep those conversations for 90 days before they are deleted automatically. And if you ask for the PDF report, your inputs and results are sent so we can build the file, and we keep a copy of that report so we can answer questions about it. It is never shared with anyone.

Forty, converted at live exchange rates. The base figures are held exactly, so switching between currencies and back never drifts the numbers.